I was rummaging around the office the other day, in an attempt to organize an electronics clean-up day, and found an original copy of Microsoft® Word 1.  Word 1, released in 1985, was the first version of Microsoft® Word for the Macintosh.  It retailed for a whopping $195.  The Macintosh version came one and a half years after the IBM PC DOS version and four long years before the first Windows version.

Word 3.0 for Macintosh was released in 1987, followed by Word 5.1 in 1992.  Word 5.1 was a very popular version due to its updated features and user friendly interface.  It was so popular, in fact, that the reporters, where I work, still use it!

You can read a fairly detailed history of Microsoft® Word on Wikipedia.

The latest version of Wordpress, 2.5, was released yesterday. Many improvements were made in 2.5, some of which include multi-file uploading, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords, media library, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts as well as pages. You can read more about this upgrade here.

Incidentally, read a very good Wordpress vs. Rapidweaver comparison here.

My browser of choice is Mozilla’s Firefox.  While Apple’s Safari probably has Firefox beaten in the speed department, the ability to customize Firefox is why I choose to use it.

There are over 1,000 add-ons for Firefox and one of my favorites is Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer.  Foxmarks is a free add-on that synchronizes your bookmarks between two or more computers.  I find it very helpful for my bookmarks to be synchronized between my computer at work and my laptop at home.

Foxmarks must be installed on each computer you want synchronized.  Upon installation, you will create an account on the Foxmarks servers.  When you have created an account, your bookmarks will be automatically and silently synchronized between two or more computers running Firefox.  You can also manage your bookmarks from any computer by visiting my.foxmarks.com.

Foxmarks is for Firefox 1.5 or higher and works with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

One of my favorite freeware applications is Alwin Troost’s WeatherDock, an application for OS X that displays weather information as a customizable floating icon, a desktop icon, and/or a menu item.

Information is pulled from The Weather Channel’s weather.com®. Current conditions are displayed in the main window, along with other various detailed weather information. You also see upcoming forecast information for 5 or 10 days.

The optional desktop icon can be set to a static location on your desktop or you can position it wherever you’d like, setting it to auto-hide when your mouse cursor nears it.

As I said, this is freeware, but there is a link for PayPal donations on their website. If you find it useful, go ahead and send a few bucks their way. By doing this, we help keep these great little apps free and fund future revisions.

Adobe’s Photoshop Express is a very good tool for users with little or no Photoshop experience. It isn’t rich in features, but what is there is perfect for those who have no way to edit photos they’d like to post online. Plus with the free storage, how can you go wrong.

I uploaded a test photo to see what I could do. Some of the available features are Crop, Auto Correct, Exposure, Red Eye Removal, Touch Up and Saturation. You can also convert to black and white, apply a nifty Sketch filter, sharpen, and adjust hue.

From what I can tell, you can’t change resolution or link to your photo from an outside source like you can with Photobucket or other image hosting services.

All in all, I think this is a great start for Adobe’s online service. It is well worth checking out!

Original Photo:

Photoshop Expressed Photo: